Locket

Some songs announce their feelings. "Locket" lets you drift into them. Over five unhurried minutes, Crumb builds a room where the weather outside seems to have gotten inside the head, and where a person sits at the center trying to work out what exactly has gone wrong. It is a song about being present in a place and absent from it at once, and about how tenderly a mind can hold a thing it can no longer quite reach.

It is also the song that made Crumb's name. The band's catalogue has grown considerably since, but this one remains the doorway most listeners walked through.

Where the song comes from

"Locket" is the title track and closing song of Crumb's second EP, released on June 23, 2017^[1]. A note on placement, since it is easy to get wrong: the song does not appear on the band's 2019 debut album Jinx. It predates it by two years, and it was later reissued alongside the band's self-titled first EP as a double-EP package^[1][5].

Crumb formed in 2016 out of Tufts University, in the Boston area, and later settled in Brooklyn. The lineup is Lila Ramani on guitar and vocals, Jesse Brotter on bass, Bri Aronow on synthesizers, keyboards and saxophone, and Jonathan Gilad on drums^[2]. The EP was produced by John Scott together with the band^[1].

I could not find an interview in which the band explains this particular song line by line, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What exists is the music, the surrounding critical conversation, and a striking music video. This essay reads the song through those, and the readings below are interpretations, not confessions.

A song with the weather inside it

The most consistent observation among early reviewers is about mood. One review of the EP describes the title track as a relaxed vocal conveying restlessness, with the narrator tying an intimate, outsized state of mind to rainfall and a feeling of mental disorientation^[3]. That pairing is the song's central gesture. Rain here is less a setting than a symptom, a way of saying that the inner climate and the outer one have stopped being separable.

Other descriptions of the EP point the same way. Its themes have been summarized as detachment, melancholia, nostalgia and uncertainty^[1]. "Locket" distills all four. The narrator seems to be going through the motions of ordinary life while some part of them lingers elsewhere, dwelling on a hurt that never gets named outright. Heartbreak is hinted at rather than stated^[3].

That restraint is the point. A song that explained its sadness would let the listener off the hook. This one asks you to sit inside the not-knowing.

The title object

A locket is a small, strange kind of memory device. It is worn against the body, closed most of the time, and holds an image or a keepsake of someone who is not there. It is meant to be private. To open it is to visit an absence.

Whether the song's narrator carries a literal locket or only the idea of one, the title frames everything. The song is itself a locket: a compact container for something precious and painful, kept near the chest and opened only in certain moods. The slow, circling structure feels like the motion of opening and closing it, over and over, never quite deciding whether to look.

This also explains why the song can feel nostalgic without ever being specific. A locket does not tell you the story of the person inside. It only insists that they mattered.

Calm music, uneasy feeling

What separates "Locket" from a standard sad song is the gap between what the music does and what the words suggest. The reviewer at Bandcamp Daily noted exactly this tension: the claustrophobic emotional material sits against a sound driven by thick bass from Brotter and layered flourishes from Aronow^[3]. The comparison offered was a milder take on Tame Impala's reverberating guitar, bass and synthesizer, or a cheerier relative of Whitney's melancholy Americana^[3].

Ramani's singing is central to the effect. She sings without strain, almost conversationally, letting her voice float around the riffs rather than push against them. Distress delivered in a calm tone reads as numbness, and numbness is one of the truest ways people experience grief. The band's lightly jazz-inflected, hazy palette (the group is often filed under psychedelic, dream pop and jazz rock^[2]) gives that numbness a place to live.

The result is a song that sounds like a warm afternoon and feels like a held breath. Listeners who describe it as soothing and listeners who describe it as unsettling are both hearing something real.

Dissociation as subject and as sound

A number of commentators have reached for the word dissociation when describing the song, and the language of silent secrets and a lonely, listless heartbreak recurs in reviews. The vocabulary fits. The track does not rise to a climactic outburst. It circulates, repeating its figures with small variations, the way a mind loops over the same unresolved thought.

In that sense the form mirrors the content. A person who is stuck in a feeling does not experience their situation as a plot with a beginning, middle and end. They experience it as texture, as the same room revisited. The song's gentle refusal to resolve is a faithful picture of that state.

The extended instrumental passages matter for the same reason. When the words fall away, the music keeps turning the feeling over, which suggests that what the narrator is dealing with cannot be said directly. Some of it can only be played.

The video and the idea of a trip

The official video, directed by the creative studio Haoyan of America and released in March 2018, deepened the song's reputation^[4]. It was shot with 360-degree cameras and follows Ramani as she moves through a house full of people after drinking tea, in a sequence NPR described as psychedelic, an acid-trip-like experience^[1][4].

Seen alongside the song, the video makes the dissociative reading concrete. A familiar domestic space becomes warped and slightly threatening, and the central figure drifts through it, present but not quite participating. It turns the song's internal distance into a visible one: a party happening around someone who is somewhere else.

Why it resonated

The numbers suggest that many people recognized themselves in the track. According to a 2019 Pitchfork feature as summarized on Wikipedia, "Locket" has accumulated more than 118 million Spotify plays, making it among the band's most streamed songs^[1]. For a first-wave bedroom-adjacent EP track from a young band, that is a remarkable figure.

Some of the appeal is surely sonic. The song arrived at a moment when hazy, jazz-tinged indie psychedelia was finding a large online audience, and it is simply easy to put on. But a song does not hold an audience for years on atmosphere alone. People return to "Locket" because it gives them a way to name a mood they otherwise struggle to describe: not dramatic sorrow, but the flat, drifting ache of carrying something unresolved through an otherwise normal day.

It also set the template for what followed. Jinx, the band's 2019 debut album, was described as dealing with anxiety, fear of the unknown and the uncanny side of everyday life^[5], and the seeds of those preoccupations are all audible here, two years earlier.

Other ways to hear it

The heartbreak reading is the most common, and it is well supported by the sense of a keepsake held for someone absent. But there are alternatives.

One reads the song as being about depression or mental fog rather than any particular person. In this view the locket is a metaphor for a feeling the narrator cannot put down, and the rain stands for the persistent low pressure of a bad stretch. The absence of a named lost love supports this.

A second reading treats it as a song about nostalgia itself, the way a past self can feel like a stranger you once loved. The EP's themes of nostalgia and uncertainty^[1] fit this well, and so does the song's habit of circling rather than advancing.

A third, more literal reading takes the video at its word and hears the song as a portrait of altered perception, a night when ordinary rooms and ordinary people stop making sense. The lyrics need not be about anything more than that to be affecting.

None of these cancels the others. The song is built loosely enough to hold all of them, which is part of why it lasts.

Conclusion

"Locket" works because it trusts the listener. It offers a mood, a small symbolic object, and a long, patient arrangement, then steps back. The sadness at its center is never explained, and the music never insists that it be resolved.

Years on, it still sounds like what it was when it first appeared: a young band discovering that the most powerful way to describe an ache is to let it hang in the air, a little out of reach, like something kept close to the chest and not quite opened.